Sunday Support Group: Ah, July (OT)

A quote for you. The usual disclaimer here—I'm not an expert on this subject. Just talking about the latest book I'm reading. It's by a gastroenterologist and it's about gut health. The study of gut microorganisms is a new field that's really only gotten going in earnest since about 2005, and one stated aim of the book is to bring laypeople up to speed with what's been going on in the field. Here's the quote:

Diversity of plants is the number one predictor of a healthy gut microbiota
At this point, you probably don’t need me to explain why the Golden Rule of plant-based diversity matters. You’ve heard it throughout this book. This is our anthem. Our core philosophy. We no longer need a laundry list of food rules, we only need to remember to eat a diversity of plants. When you walk into the supermarket, remember: “Diversity of plants.” When you’re at the salad bar, trying to figure out what to add, remember: “Diversity of plants.” “Diversity of plants” should cross your mind whenever you’re thinking about what to eat.

—Will Bulsiewicz MD, Fiber Fueled (p. 181)

(The heading is part of the paragraph from the book.)

The Hadza tribe, a modern hunter-gatherer society in Northern Tanzania whose members eat no processed foods and not even any foods originating from farms, might not have a lot of wealth in the way some of us think about it, but they have something very precious that most of us Westerners don't: they enjoy very good gut health. The typical Hadza gets an average of 100 grams of fiber a day, eats thirty different kinds of plants in a day, and has 30 to 40% more different kinds of microbes and bacteria in their guts than average Brits or Americans do. (More being better.) That's versus a paltry 15 grams of relatively poor-quality (i.e., low-diversity) fiber daily for Americans on average—38 grams being recommended daily for adult males.

Here's an interesting thing I learned from the book. It turns out that when you think you have an intolerance for some variety of plant food, you're right—you actually do. But you're very likely to draw precisely the wrong conclusion from that.

Let's say you think you can't eat beans. Beans make you bloated and gassy. Your stomach burbles and gurgles, and you're uncomfortable. So you very logically think, whew, beans! Bad for me. Never eating those again.

Wrong conclusion. What's really going on is that you have an unhealthy gut—your gut bacteria are depleted, starved out, limited, and your system lacks the flora needed to digest beans easily and comfortably. Why? Because you never eat bean fiber and you have a low level of microbial diversity in your gut. But the solution to that is not to avoid beans...that's what led to the problem in the first place. The solution is to go "low and slow to grow" in Dr. Bulsiewicz's words, and steadily reintroduce bean fiber to your diet to repopulate your gut with the microbes that are missing.

So you get a can of organic beans and dole out just a teaspoon of them on to your salad each day. Start with a very low dose, go very slow, and begin to build up the variety of your gut flora again.

Eat them regularly—a big problem with food intolerance is that we never eat something and then we eat a large amount of it all at once, bombarding our system with something it's not used to dealing with. Go slow and go steady.

After a few weeks you'll be able to digest beans comfortably, and your gut will be that much stronger and healthier.

So that's what people mean when they say "we're all different" when it comes to diet and food. In fact, we all are: it's because we all have a different profile of microorganisms in our intestines.

Enthusiasm
As a read, Fiber Fueled starts rather awkwardly and tentatively. But as soon as Dr. Bulsiewicz gets to the science he perks right up and all but overflows with enthusiasm. He works with patients who have serious gut issues of all kinds, so naturally he goes through all those issues. He makes a convincing case that most of us have guts that are badly damaged by antibiotics, alcohol, and our number one type of malnutrition, namely the critical shortage of fiber in our diets. (The majority of Americans think there's fiber in steak! No. All fiber comes from plants.)

Diversity of plants is his mantra for gut health. Although in 400 pages he goes a little further into it than that. For the most part, I was already doing a lot of what he suggests. For quite a while now I've been in the habit of adding all sorts of different plants to whatever I cook. Little of this, little of that in everything. When I read that part about the Hadza eating thirty different kinds of plants a day, though, I heard that little voice in my head go, thirty! I'll never get to that. So I actually counted. If you allow specific spices to count, as well as different kinds of greens in a salad, I actually ate 28 different kinds of plants yesterday. So I might be doing better than I thought.

Of course, it's high produce season here in the Finger Lakes, so eating plant-based is easy right now. Not to mention very pleasurable. (It's kind of weird to be eating all I can stand to and still be losing weight.) Even though I was already full, I gorged myself on a bowl of locally-grown raspberries, strawberries, and blackberries for dessert a few hours ago—all high in gut-friendly fiber. They melted in my mouth. Heavenly. And there are more for tomorrow.

This season actually makes me a little sad because I can only eat so much. I stuff myself to the scuppers until I can't take another bite, and there's still a cornucopia of fresh produce lined up waiting its turn. I had yellow squash and mushrooms in my salad today, along with about a dozen other things, but the fresh peas are going to have to wait till tomorrow.

So much plantatious goodness abounding, so little room for it all. Ah, July.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Comments

[Rick in CO]

Mike, I have visited northern Uganda with a NGO and cannot confirm these suppositions. In the rural areas the diet is relatively restricted, not the diversity this author wants to idealize.
Just another pretty much uninformed person promoting a book IMHO.
Take a trip to Africa and see for yourself.
Rick in CO

[Sorry, that was my fault, not the author's. I just went by memory. When I got your comment I looked up the section in the book again and changed the post to be more accurate. He was referring to a specific tribe. Sorry for my error. --Mike]

[MikeR]

It's HARD to get up to that 30+ grams of fiber. I just this evening picked a large quantity, and variety, of greens from my vegetable garden. My usual serving of greens for salad fills a large bowl typically used as a serving bowl. Yet, unless I'm using this resource incorrectly (https://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2475/2, I only get a coupla grams fiber.

Thinking about different kinds of plants, do you also count ground pepper, olive oil, and such? If you do, I can get pretty close to the variety recommended. But, at about 24 gr a day, still some distance from the fiber.

[Might have to do with what we eat. He says there are 400,000 species of plants on Earth and 300,000 of them are edible, and the Hazda (that Africa tribe from Tanzania) eat 600 types of plants whereas we eat about 50. I'm guessing that most of our 50 are engineered to be mild (and sweeter) and easy to digest.

It shouldn't be too hard to get above 30, though. For example, a cup of raspberries is 8g, a cup of green peas is 9g, an apple is 4.5g, two cups of cooked whole wheat spaghetti is 12 g, and voila you're at 33.5 grams already. A cup of black beans or a cup of green lentils each have 15 g. I add half a cup of red lentils to both my spaghetti and my rice and beans--that boosts the fiber of each dish by an additional 8 g.

By the way I am jealous that you get fresh greens from your own garden! How great. I would love that. --Mike]

[Richard Parkin]

You can increase the variety of vegetables by using fresh herbs some of which you can grow yourself in pots even if your garden is a bit shaded. You do mention spices so you probably included dried herbs in that. Pickled vegetables (thinking sauerkraut etc). Frozen vegetables too can help.

[Joel Wolford]

Have you ever considered preserving fresh vegetables for the winter months? (Here in KY, we call that "canning vegetables"). You would need Mason Jars or the equivalent, a pressure cooker, and a place to store the finished jars. As much as you seemed to enjoy the process of developing film, and preparing coffee and tea, this might be something you would like, as there is definitely a process to it.

[Adam Lanigan]

Tangentially July and gut related:

"And I say your uncle was a crooked French Canadian
And he was gut-shot runnin' gin
And how his guts were all suspended in his fingers
And how he held 'em
How he held 'em held, 'em in
And the water rolls down the drain, the water rolls down the drain,
Oh what a lonely thing! in a lonely drain!
July, July, July! never seemed so strange"

- the Decemberists, "July, July"

It would seem that running gin was not the best way to improve gut health.

[Mike Ferron]

Lets see today.. one lemon, blueberries, strawberries, banana, kale, spinach, onion, red bell pepper, mushrooms, tomato and garlic.

Now the pricey, vegan nutritional powder added to the breakfast drink has a lot of other fruits and veggies but I wonder how nutrition those space age powders actually are?

[Aashish Sharma]

Speaking of fruit, what about your beloved peaches? Your peach farmer friend should be able to provide some. Or is the season already gone by now? :-)

Regards,
Aashish

[Paul McEvoy]

There's a lot of pseudo-sciency stuff in this. It may very well be that a tribe in Africa has better gut health than Americans, but saying that it's one factor like the diversity of their diet is not credible beyond even a basic examination.

Are they:
Less sedentary than Westerners?
Are they getting more natural bacteria from their natural environment?
Is the lack of industrial level sanitation leaving them more in contact with bacteria that influences their gut flora?
Is there some natural mediating factor present in their guts that has been removed from westerners guts?

There's a long list of things that would strike me as being more influential than the number of different things that they eat. That seems maybe the least significant.

Quote from his website:
"But wait. How do I know this system works exactly?
Because I’ve taken this journey myself— and I’ll never share anything with you that I haven’t (or wouldn’t) try myself."

NO! The fact that he's "taken this journey" and feels a specific way means nothing whatsoever. It's not a way that someone credible talks about things. He's one data point in something that's pretty close to impossible to pin down.

Talking conclusively about micro-nutrition is close to impossible. We can see what happens if you take basic nutrients out of the diet of a population, and we can see what happens when we overload people with clearly unhealthy foods, but as far as tweaking things at some micro level, you can't get closer than "expert opinion", which is better than non-expert opinion, but not by much.

Additionally, while antibiotics definitely do screw up your gut flora and this seems to be significant in many ways, anytime we criticize them, we also need to point out that they are miracles. This week I quite possibly would have had a dead dog and a dead dad without antibiotics. It's important that we talk about them in that context.

I think if you feel good eating in some way and find that it's helping you in your goals, that's great. But suggesting that there is some secret code to eating that is scientifically proven is not credible.

[...In your non-expert opinion.

Anyway, if you don't want to read the book, don't. Structurally, it's a standard popular diet book, and the only thing that statistically proven to happen when you read a pop diet book is that you become more likely to buy another pop diet book. As always, it's up to you. --Mike]

[emptyspaces]

Does the book make any mention of probiotics? During Covid I have dialed in my kombucha production (3L per week, my kids go nuts for it) and I make a fermented hot sauce I eat constantly. Sometimes I’ll do a lactobacillus ferment of sauerkraut, pickles or kimchi. I don’t think there’s ever a time I don’t have a fermentation project going (the pepper sauce ferments for at least a year).

[Yes, there's a chapter on prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics, and the author, like you, is a big fan of fermenting. --Mike]

[Earl Dunbar]

I can attest that you are doing something right. When we had lunch last week I noticed the weight loss and that you looked healthier than I’ve seen in the past. Now I’m inspired!

[Bob johnston]

Has anyone done a randomised control trial? That is the only way that the truth or otherwise of this hypothesis could be discovered. Anything else is just guesswork and pseudo science.

[Simon]

Michael Greger was interviewed by Rich Roll for his podcast earlier this year and covers this topic. The discussion made for a fascinating listen.

https://www.richroll.com/podcast/michael-greger-522/